[398a]
who was capable by his cunning of assuming every kind of shape and
imitating all things should arrive in our city, bringing with himself1 the
poems which he wished to exhibit, we should fall down and worship him as a
holy and wondrous and delightful creature, but should say to him that there
is no man of that kind among us in our city, nor is it lawful for such a man
to arise among us, and we should send him away to another city, after
pouring myrrh down over his head and crowning him with fillets of wool, but
we ourselves, for our souls' good, should continue to employ
1 Greek idiom achieves an effect impossible to English here, by the shift from the co-ordination of ποιήματα with αὐτός to the treatmnt of it as the object of ἐπιδείξασθαι and the possible double use of the latter as middle with αὐτός and transitive with ποιήματα. Cf. for a less striking example 427 D, Phaedrus 250 B-C.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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